“You will need a sword,” said Garrett.
You were to be my sword, he wanted to say. “I’ll go to Lorsmir’s. Once he knows about Father, he’ll take me to his cellars. You should go. The Furies must be at Verod by now. Find a way to get Marlos and Saul out of there. Save their sorry arses from that miserable Fury storm. Do that, and I might forgive you for leaving me.”
He backed another three steps away. “And Garrett,” he said haltingly, “though you disappoint me tonight, I’ll remember everything you taught me, or tried to teach me, anyway. We may never meet again, but I want you to know your lessons were never in vain.”
After a last a smirk at Garrett and a grimace just for Dank, he walked away. He went toward the archway, where the door lay blanketed in shadows. He never looked back. He swung the doors open, allowing the moonlight to spill onto the floor, and then he was gone.
Goodbye, old friend, he thought as he marched into the courtyard beneath the cold, cold starlight. And goodbye, home.
See you never again.
The Long Way Around
Oath-breaker, Garrett ruminated of himself as he gazed over the parapets of Gryphon Keep. I let Rellen go too easily. Mooreye will kill him. Were only there two of me, that I might do all I am sworn to.
At sunrise on the morning after Rellen’s departure, Garrett lingered alone atop the eastern wall of Gryphon Keep. The skies above the city shone lavender, the dark strips of night’s cirrus burning away with dawn’s fury. The early wind gusted, tossing his earthen-hued hair into his eyes. The weight of his approaching journey was growing on his mind. Rellen will be in Grandwood by now, in Nentham’s dungeon by tomorrow.
I have sacrificed him, the same as Ande.
He stood on high for nearly an hour. Leaning over the parapets, his sleek black raiment and dented cuirass tight to his body, his mind wandered as he gazed into the dawn. Ande. Her smile slipped into his thoughts. My oath to her was hardest to break. Easier to think of her as alive, carefree and laughing. Better that than living in a cage or ground to gristle by Furyon boots.
No matter Rellen and Andelusia’s fate, his road would be hardest, he knew. To Furyon he meant to go. The impression Dank had given him was that the odds of survival were low, and the chance of suffering great. He felt as prepared as possible for such an ordeal. His destrier was fed and watered in the stables, his saddlebags stuffed with all manner of bread, water, and dry, tasteless meats. Lorsmir’s sword, silent and cold, clung to his thigh in its hard, black scabbard. Save for small glimmers of Ande and the ache of Rellen’s leaving fresh in his mind, his heart was hard and his soul prepared.
The sun climbed higher. He made his descent to the courtyard, passing poor Helena on his way. “Farewell, sweet lady,” he told her, recognizing her pain. “We will not see each other again. It is my hope Emun and Rellen return before autumn.”
“You’re good to say it.” She saw through his attempt at kindness. “But our hopes are hollow. Which is more likely: the sun rising on the morrow or Nentham Thure marching against us?”
He dared not lie to her again. “If Nentham comes, you must flee. Grandwood will be safest. Briar will welcome you.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then retreated to the depths of the hall.
In the sweltering sunlight, he marched. He felt like a mote of shadow sweeping through Gryphon’s streets, each fluid stride delivering him closer to Furyon. No sooner did he reach the city’s edge than he saw Dank glide out of an alleyway. The little man’s bottomless cloak was gone, replaced by a robe of lapis-colored silk. Slung over his shoulders was a rucksack fit for a man twice his size. “Forgive my lateness.” Dank dropped the sack unceremoniously at his feet. “It’s not every day a fellow makes for Furyon.”
He gave Dank’s bag a frown. “You travel heavy for one so light.”
“If you worry for me, you’re welcome to carry it,” said Dank with a smirk. “But what of this wondrous horse of yours? They say the city shakes when you ride, that cobblestones crack beneath its shoes. Can the beast bear us both?”
“Unlikely,” he answered. “Follow.”
With Dank close behind, he strode past the edge of Gryphon, where the whitewood dwellings came to an end against a sea of waist-high grass. He spotted farmers in the nearby fields, staring instead of working. He saw maids as well, buckets swaying in their grasps as they watched him go by. “They know our quest.” He nodded at the somber-faced folk. “Mourners at a funeral. Rumors fly fast.”
Dank sighed. “Yes, but ‘tis not for us they grieve. They only just learned that Rellen slipped away in the night. They fear for him, and for what Mooreye will do if both Gryphon lords are lost. Some of them are even upset with you, Master Croft. They think you should’ve gone with the lad. But then of course they know nothing of Furyon.”
“In that, they and I are nearly the same,” he replied.
He crossed half a dozen fields. The houses of Gryphon fell behind him. He and Dark arrived at the outer stables, a longhouse planted at the junction of four fields, its high roof held up by thick, polished wooden beams. He was first inside, but Dank came in right after him, smiling on his way to the rear of the great building.
Inside the stables’ gloom, he halted at his destrier’s stall and stroked the beast’s ebon mane. A snort was the only reply given to his affections. And he should be unhappy, knowing what I know. Leading the beast outside, he vaulted into the saddle and circled the stables, allowing the massive steed to stamp at the grass and stretch out its taut, overworked muscles. Completing his jaunt, he pulled to a stop at the stables’ front. Galloping out was Dank, seated proudly atop a horse of his own.
“Mine’s prettier than yours!” Dank hooted as he rode past.
Dank’s mare was but half the size of Garrett’s warhorse, though no less noble. Her mane was like the glinting of a silver knife, refined and without blemish, while her coat was burnished white and grey, like the foaming of the sea on a cloudy dawn. Graceful and muscular, she skipped through the grass with the ease of a hunting cat.
“Quite a creature,” he remarked as he turned in his saddle.
Dank displayed his usual unsettling grin. “From the Elrain grasslands. Just north of Cour Lake. There’re no horses like her in Graehelm. I seldom ride her anymore, but what better time than now? Come a day not so long from now, I’ll set her free. She can’t last the whole way to Furyon, nor would I want her to.”
“Parting with such a creature would pain me.”
Dank swept his palm under the mare’s chin, scratching her as he might a housecat. “Truly, but she can’t go to Furyon. Once we reach the mountains, we’ll come to where no horse can run. I’ll send her north. Your horse may follow her, if he’s swift enough.”
He grimaced at that. The big black destrier was his favorite, gleaned from the stables at Ardenn. “You say we must give up our mounts, which means you have already decided the best way to Furyon. You ask for many sacrifices, and you make no promises.”
“Nothing is promised, Lord Croft. No one should know that better than you.”
“I am not a lord. But you will give me answers all the same. If I am to lose my horse and betray all my oaths, you will hold nothing back.”
Dank lavished a last bit of attention upon his mare. “I’ll tell all on the road. I have my plans, and they are many. You’ll not like them, but they’re the price we must pay.”
For the next four days, he and Dank rode.
They went not hiding beneath the night as he and Rellen had done, but rather openly across the northern prairies of Graehelm. A swaying tract of gold and green was their road, a lonely place where most folk would never think to explore. The prairie’s exquisite serenity, spilling out across the empty heart of Graehelm, was a realm he traveled almost contentedly. Whether the sun was shining or the grey rain pattering upon his forehead, he savored the moments of peacefulness, for he knew they were not long promised.
On the fourth eve, a rainstorm brewed in the nor
th.
The ill-tempered weather announced its intentions by scorching the sky with lightning and cracking the short silences between with cacophonies of thunder. Both horses were nervous, so he and Dank settled into a willow thicket. This is not unlike the Fury storm, he thought as he huddled against a willow trunk. I pray Rellen finds shelter before it strikes Mooreye.
The skies darkened with strips of clouds like shadow. On all sides, the willow branches swayed and touched his shoulders, dappling him with the storm’s first droplets. “You have said much of the Furies,” he said to Dank, who hunkered on the opposite flank of the same tree. “But most are truths I already know. The rain is coming. We will be here awhile. Now is as good a time as any to tell me the rest.”
“Furyon…yes…” Dank murmured. “Strong indeed, but not so great as the power they conceal.”
“Their power is obvious.” He held his palms outward, watching as the rain sluiced the dirt between his fingers away. “I want to know about their people, their customs. I want you to tell me why they wish to subjugate Graehelm. Grae lands must have something Furyon lacks. I expect you know what it is.”
Dank sighed. “Most would find it easier to believe Furyon is a land of furnaces filled with corpses and rivers running red with blood. But except for a few places, nothing could be farther from the truth. Furyon is as fair as Graeland, perhaps even more so. No, it’s not your land they are after. They crave no resource of yours.”
Garrett thought the claim unlikely. “Seems improbable you would know this,” he said, “Unless you have been there.”
Dank fell silent again. Garrett took it as affirmation of the truth. The little man tells many stories, but gives few facts. If he understood me, he would not bother to dissemble.
The rain slashed harder. Like knives it fell, carving sidelong into the grass, turning the loam into muck. Strange was that not a single drop of it struck any part of Garrett save his palm. The rain swirled and dove and made the grasses droop low as hunchbacks, but he and his destrier remained dry.
I am deceived.
The rain falls everywhere but upon me.
Dank’s voice chimed between blasts of thunder. “As I said before, Lord Croft, I’ve been more places than most. Furyon wasn’t always as it is now. Someone terrible must’ve come to power for this war to have begun. Someone must’ve known to look for that which the rest of you have forgotten.”
Dank’s stories no longer interested him. He extended his palm again, grasping for a handful of rain, but the longer he waited for the water to strike his hand, the more he understood it would not. Warlock… he mused of Dank. Another of his tricks.
The rain will not bother us tonight.
The days thereafter were hot and comfortless. Leaving the prairies behind, he and Dank journeyed far north of Gryphon, where the grasslands sank into morasses of rotting thickets and shallow, murky lakes. Mooreye again, he thought a thousand times. Rellen would hate it, though Andelusia would not mind.
By taking the roundabout path, he and Dank came near to the river Tysmouth, whose waters flowed westward across the land, splitting the twin Graehelm cities of Dalkin and Jalen. “The twins have likely fallen under Mooreye’s sway,” Dank warned. “We must slip through the swamps, not too close to Tysmouth, but far enough north so Nentham won’t notice.”
Three days of skulking though dead thickets, slogging through grey muck, and sleeping on beds of sticks and leaves, and the ugliest part of his journey fell behind him.
Beyond the Tysmouth’s swampy hinterlands lay the outlying villages of Barrok, no longer under control of Lord Lothe. The villages were unhappy places these days. The midden heaps, shanties, and low-slung dwellings were clustered like pimples on the earth, the lot of them surrounded by rain-sodden farmlands. “We won’t go there,” Dank explained. “Too many ears. Too many hungry mouths. The only help we can give them is to destroy the Furyons.”
After a few days of scurrying past the huddled, unkempt villages, he and Dank came as close as they dared to the Tysmouth. He glimpsed the river just once, and even then only in the black of night. The moonlight glinted on the dark water, a pale sickle tonguing its restless surface. He saw the shanties leaning beside it, and he heard the splashes of fishermen’s lures as they cast their bait into the shallows. And then it was gone again. In the deepest black of night, he and Dank crept over the northern arm of the great Crossroad and left Graehelm behind.
Two days later, Dank brought him to the southern edge of the Nimis.
It was an unfamiliar, inhospitable land. Garrett thought it worse even than Mooreye, for it was here the fertile reaches of the south were whittled away by the great wasteland of the north. He and Dank rode where the Nimis and the Dales blended and struggled for dominance. Low, coarse shrubs crawled like sun-baked worms on the earth, their misshapen limbs shadowed by small, twisted trees. The air was dry, the winds hot and sprinkled with sand. The flatness of the prairies was gone, replaced by scabrous hills whose sides were all rock, dust, and stunted flora. “The folk of old once mined the Nimis,” Dank explained. “They hewed every tree, gutted every hill, and drained every lake. They sought the same black mineral as the Furies possess, the Dageni, but found not nearly enough to justify what they did to the land.”
The Nimis lands, so far from Garrett’s beloved mountains and forests, strained him into brooding and daylong silences.
The days were dry, the nights chilled with Dank’s hard-to-believe tales. Food and water were perilously scarce. Even Dank’s rucksack, once bursting with provisions, shrank until it seemed too easy to carry. This is what I agreed to, he reminded himself each eve. Damn me if I listened to a liar. But look at him. He stares at the same dark spot in the sky each night. He sees his goal clear as starlight.
The Fury relic is real.
One night, as he lay on his back in the scrub, he decided to pry at Dank’s web of secrets. The little man had told him much on the road, but next to nothing of himself. “I know why you came to Gryphon,” he said as he gazed reverently at the stars. “You are a hunter. You hate the Fury Object. You have long sought the chance to destroy it. And now…the war. Your time is running out.”
Dank observed the same stars as he. “A wiser assumption than most would’ve conjured, and mostly true. You’ve touched the heart of the matter, Garrett. I’ve sought the Object for so, so long, but only now can I feel it enough to find it. I owe Emun Gryphon my life. He kept me safe and secret when no other soul of Gryphon would help. I only hope I’m not too late.”
He sensed Dank was unusually talkative tonight, and decided to delve deeper. “Once, in Emun’s hall, you mentioned there were others like you. I listened then, and I remember now. If these fellows of yours are of like mind, one wonders why they are not here in place of me.”
Dank sighed. “When I said there were others like me, I didn’t mean to suggest they share my cause. We’re spread thin, they and I, and for good reason. My brethren aren’t my friends, nor my kin. They don’t love me, never have.”
“A shame,” he said. “I suppose one warlock is enough.”
A while longer of watching the stars, and Dank’s mood darkened. Garrett did not see it as much as sense it, feeling Dank’s morbid state of mind floating in the air as though it were a bitter breeze sloughing off a mountainside. “Yes…” Dank brooded. “We were different, all of us. Only a handful of us were what you would call…benevolent. As for the rest, they were never friends of mine. They are, or were, rotten. Their magicks were blacker than mine, their hearts and heads corrupted. They were alive, but dead, if that makes any sense.”
“It does not.”
With a shiver, Dank pulled his waifish robe over his ears. “Alive but dead,” he repeated. “Tyberian. After they remade the first of the Objects, many never found their final rest. Their spirits endured long after their bodies wasted away. Some say they haunt the earth still, though I hope otherwise. For if they do…”
He asked nothing else. Dank’s sto
ry settled in his stomach like sour wine, a tale too grim to be true. He implies he is as old as Tyberia. He shut his eyes and hoped Dank would say no more. I have seen and heard enough. Whether there be magic or whether my mind is breaking, I care not to know.
At mid-afternoon of the next day, the dry gullies and bleak barrens of the Nimis leveled out. He slogged atop his horse beneath the hot sun, his skin rank with sweat, his body boiling beneath his clothes. Perhaps black was the wrong choice of raiment, he thought. The sun might slay me before the Furies do, and my bones picked clean by jackals. Worse than the heat were the lack of food and water, both dwindling in Dank’s rucksack, and neither readily available in the scrubland.
And then, an hour before dusk, the Nimis ended.
He and Dank mounted a final ridge of pale rocks and whip-thin trees, and then plummeted into a grassy field on the ridge’s far side. His destrier was happiest of all. The lathered beast halted at the field’s edge, chomping great mouthfuls of grass and gulping from a glass-surfaced puddle. Garrett dismounted and walked ahead. He glimpsed thickets, pastures of reeds and wildflowers, and a stream babbling through the field’s center. The falling sun gilded his face as he knelt before the water and washed away a week’s worth of grime. No death today. Tomorrow perhaps, he mused.
“Hoy.” Dank sidled up beside him atop his mare. “Look ahead, beyond those trees. Do you see what I see?”
His face and hands dripping with water, he lifted his gaze to the horizon. There, across a far field, a line of trees stood like soldiers ready for battle, ranks and ranks of them climbing the slopes of a hill greener than any he had seen in weeks. “Velum.” He breathed easier at the sight. “Though far north of Verod.”
“It had to be this way,” Dank apologized. “The straight path to Mormist would’ve led us through Nentham’s land, and I’m not so brave as Lord Rellen.”
He gazed into the trees, admiring them as though he knew their names. Velum’s canopy was vaulted, the leaves like a shimmering ceiling, and the ground beneath illumined by spears of sunlight. The glades between the trees were as spacious as in Grandwood, each clearing as wide and grassy as the courtyard of Gryphon Keep. “The trees here are different than in the south,” he observed. “Here, it is all old oaks growing where they will. In Trebidal and Tratec, the forest has been harvested hundreds of times. Everything is young and ordered.”
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 42
